B.C. right-to-die advocates not happy with federal bill

The federal government’s bill on assisted dying, introduced Thursday, was met with disappointment by B.C. right-to-die advocates who were upset the legislation ignores the will of those who do not wish to be kept alive with a mentally deteriorating illness such as dementia. The new law allows seriously ill or dying Canadians medical help to end […]

The federal government’s bill on assisted dying, introduced Thursday, was met with disappointment by B.C. right-to-die advocates who were upset the legislation ignores the will of those who do not wish to be kept alive with a mentally deteriorating illness such as dementia.

The new law allows seriously ill or dying Canadians medical help to end their lives. The legislation says there should be a choice of medically assisted death “for adults who are suffering intolerably and for whom death is reasonably foreseeable.”

That’s more restrictive than what the Supreme Court said last year when it overturned the existing prohibition on doctor-assisted suicide. The Supreme Court did not require a person’s condition to be terminal for them to request a doctor’s help to end their lives.

The bill says those eligible for assisted dying are mentally competent adults, 18 years or older, who voluntary request help with informed consent. They must have a serious and incurable disease, illness or disability and be in an advanced state of irreversible decline in capability.

It does not allow for advance consent from Canadians stating they wish to die should they later be diagnosed with a debilitating illness. It was this omission that shocked some B.C. families and right-to-die advocates.

Kay Carter would not have qualified for an assisted death under the law proposed Thursday, noted the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, a plaintiff in the Supreme Court case. The 89-year-old B.C. woman suffered “excruciating physical and psychological distress” from spinal stenosis, but was not facing imminent death, the BCCLA said.

“We think it’s shameful that the woman who was at the very heart of this litigation would be a person who would not qualify for a compassionate and peaceful death,” said BCCLA litigation director Grace Pastine.

Carter travelled secretly to Switzerland in January 2010, where she was able to legally obtain medical help to end her life.

Sara Fox, daughter of Gillian Bennett, who had dementia and took her own life in 2014 at age 83, said she also was greatly disappointed in the law. She said no one should have to take such dramatic measures as her mother to end their lives.

“I think it is a really big shame. Instead of people like my mum having the option of making the decision while she can think clearly … she had to take her life sooner than she should have because she couldn’t run that risk,” she said.

Fox said the law takes away the right of people to make their own decision about how they die before something happens and they are unable to think clearly — for example, a brain injury or being on medication that clouds judgment.

She believes the government left out the advanced consent to keep the law simple, but “it’s not simple. It’s mean. And we are not a country of mean people.”

Bennett feared her dementia would lead to the indignity of losing her mind and being kept alive by nurses and doctors, not knowing her own children.

The Vancouver Sun’s Denise Ryan followed her story, which detailed how Bennett dragged a mattress out to her favourite spot on Bowen Island before taking a lethal dose of Nembutal mixed with water, her husband by her side. After her death, she made public her Dead at Noon website to advocate for physician-assisted options for the terminally ill and elderly.

Bennett did not want to be a “carcass,” physically alive but “with no one inside.” That wish was similar to that of another B.C. woman, Margot Bentley, a nurse who wrote a living will in the late 1990s stating that she did not want to be kept alive in a vegetative state.

Bentley, 84, has advanced Alzheimer’s disease and continues to be spoon-fed in a care home in Abbotsford. Her daughter Katherine Hammond, has been fighting on her behalf to have her mother’s wishes respected, and has been waiting for the law to be enacted so they can proceed with assisted death.

But the law means that her mother will continue to be kept alive, which has left the family shocked and disheartened.

Hammond said she respects the beliefs of religious groups opposed to assisted dying, but said that was not her mother’s belief.

“This is about Margot Bentley and not about anyone else. She was a registered nurse. She didn’t want to see anyone suffer the way she has been forced to suffer,” said Hammond.

“I thought the committee made excellent decisions. I don’t see why a mentally competent adult like my mother is having her wishes ignored. My mother has been excluded, as have hundreds of thousands of Canadians, and it is absolutely wrong. ”

Still, she is hopeful that Canadians will demand the changes to the law. She encouraged others to support Dying with Dignity in its fight to have the law amended to include advanced directives.

Vancouver psychiatrist Derryck Smith, who is on the board of Dying with Dignity, said the Liberal government has disregarded its own committee, which issued “a very thoughtful report” on assisted dying, which included allowing advanced directive from those with dementia.

“This legislation disregards and is disrespectful of the decision from that committee,” he said

Now Smith is concerned for the thousands of dementia patients who had been waiting for the law to help them end their lives with dignity. He’s worried they will be seek options, like Bennett, to do it on their own, or end up like Bentley, kept alive in a condition in which they did not choose to live.

Also shut out of the legislation, he added, are those with incurable psychiatric conditions, such as severe depression that cannot be treated.

“We encourage an amendment to put advanced directives back in the legislation,” he said, adding that he became an advocate after watching two relatives die with dementia. “It’s awful. You end up in diapers, in feces and urine, and there are many people who are aware of that and who do not want to proceed down that path.”

The government is going to appoint one or more independent bodies to study some outstanding issues not explicitly dealt with in the legislation, including whether it could cover mature minors and people who suffer only from mental illnesses, and whether people could have advance directives that would grant them access to medically assisted death should a situation arise.

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